Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) is an organization founded by members of historic peace churches that sends volunteers to hot spots across the globe where the well-being of local people is threatened by violence. The hope is that the presence of nonviolent witnesses with ties to international media will tamp down the level of violence. As Peacemakers says, its goal is “to get in the way.”
Tom Fox joined the CPT following a twenty-year career as a musician in the Marine Corps Band and after becoming a Quaker. In 2004 he joined three other CPT members on a mission to Iraq. Their work in Baghdad consisted of helping the families of imprisoned Iraqis secure financial assistance, making sure that medical supplies wound up in hospitals and clinics instead of on the black market, and working to build a strong CPT presence in Iraq.
In late November 2005, Fox and his fellow CPT volunteers were kidnapped by Al-Qaeda guerrillas who threatened to execute the four men unless the United States released all Iraqi prisoners. Three of the hostages were eventually rescued after being held for five months. Fox wasn’t one of them. His body was found on 9 March 2006. He had been shot several times and dumped on a garbage heap in Baghdad. Cuts and bruises on his body suggested that he might have been tortured.
It’s still unclear why Fox was singled out for execution. Perhaps it was because of his service in the Marine Corps. Before his abduction, knowing the danger he and his fellow CPT volunteers faced, Fox made his friends promise that they wouldn’t seek vengeance if he was abducted.
During his time in Iraq, Fox wrote a blog recording his activities and impressions. In an entry titled “Why are we here?”—posted the day before he was snatched by Al-Qaeda—Fox wrote this: “If I understand the message of God, his response to that question is that we are to take part in the creation of the Peaceable Realm of God. As I survey the landscape here in Iraq, dehumanization seems to be the operative means of relating to each other. We are here to root out all aspects of dehumanization that exists within us. We are here to stand with those being dehumanized by oppressors and stand firm against that dehumanization. We are here to stop people, including ourselves, from dehumanizing any of God’s children, no matter how much they dehumanize their own souls.”
In the way he conducted himself during the last few years of his life, as well as in the way he died, Fox truly did stand with the victims of dehumanization.
10 March
Asghar Ali Engineer
10 March 1940—
De-politicizing Religion
When he was a boy, Asghar Ali Engineer’s father, a Muslim Bohra priest (Bohra is an India-based Shi’a sect), told him two things. The first was that violence is never justifiable. “He often drew my attention,” recalls Engineer, “to the verse of the Qur’an that to kill a person without justification amounts to killing whole humanity and to save a human life amounts to saving whole humanity.” The second bit of advice from his father was “to do what my conscience dictated and not to care for the consequences.” Engineer took both to heart.
After working as a municipal engineer in Bombay for twenty years, Engineer retired to serve as a leader in the Bohra community. But over the years his progressive interpretations of Islam proved too controversial for his fellow religionists, and he was formally expelled from the community in 2004. Views that got him into trouble included his conviction that women deserve the same legal and civil rights as men; that violence, especially when perpetrated in the name of religion, is an affront to all genuine religious sensibilities; and that sectarianism—or what he calls “communalism”—is a disrupter of domestic and international peace.
Engineer first became worried about sectarian violence as a youth, when murderous confrontations between Muslims and Hindus raged across India. Such cruelty perpetrated in the name of religion, he concluded, was a corruption. “Religion to me never could be a source of hatred. It always was a source of compassion and love.”
Problems arise, Engineer believes, when religion becomes politicized as a weapon wielded by special interest groups. “It is not religion but misuse of religion and politicizing of religion, which is the main culprit.” The collapse of religion into sectarianism or communalism too easily encourages adherents to see nonbelievers as less-than-human outsiders, and this in turn induces a forgetfulness of the core religious insight that each person represents the whole of humanity. When that happens, sectarian violence is just around the corner. It follows, argues Engineer, that the key to avoiding it is to keep politics and religion distinct from one another. When it comes to criminal law, human rights, civil liberties, and social entitlements, the best framework is a secular one. Religion as “a source of moral and spiritual richness” remains independent and consequently is able to serve as society’s moral and spiritual barometer. Moreover, because it’s not dragooned as an ideological weapon by any one sect, it “does not pose any challenge for a secular political set up.” Used as an “instrument of power” by sectarians, religion becomes dangerous. Embraced as a foundation for compassion and virtue, it enriches individual lives and the moral fabric of society. It honors the insight that each human contains all of humanity.
11 March
Rutilio Grande
5 July 1928—12 March 1977
Proclaiming Subversion
It didn’t take long at all. Just a few bursts from a couple of machine guns, and Jesuit father Rutilio Grande was silenced. The spray of bullets that took his life also killed an old man and a teenage boy who just happened to be passengers in the car Grande was driving when the murderers caught up with him. But in every war, there’s so-called collateral damage.
Grande was murdered because the El Salvadoran military thought him a threat to the small country’s elite class who controlled the government and most of the national wealth. Grande, a native El Salvadoran who studied in Rome, taught at the Catholic seminary in San Salvador, and served the parish of Aguilares, sought to empower hitherto voiceless peasants by giving them some control over their spiritual and material destinies. For generations, they had been stifled by a hierarchical Church on the one hand and an oppressive economic and political system on the other. Grande encouraged their liberation through the establishment of Christian base communities, self-reliant groups of peasants who regularly met to discuss the gospels and the ways in which Jesus’ message shed light upon their situation. The base communities, serving as they did to raise consciousness among the peasantry, were condemned by the authorities as dangerously seditious, and it became increasingly risky for priests like Grande to remain in El Salvador.
The beginning of the end for Grande came in early 1977. In January a meddlesomely “subversive” priest had been snatched by government authorities and thrown out of the country. Two weeks later, Grande delivered a sermon at his Aguilares church that blasted the climate of fear and oppression created by the ruling junta. “I am fully aware,” he said, “that very soon the Bible and the Gospels will not be allowed to cross the border. All that will reach us will be the covers, since all the pages are subversive—against sin, it is said. So that if Jesus crosses the border, they will not allow him to enter. They would accuse him, the man-God . . . of being an agitator. . . . Brothers, they would undoubtedly crucify him again.” This sermon was Grande’s death warrant, as he must have known it would be. A month later he was dead.
But Grande’s murder bore fruit. It energized his friend Óscar Romero, who had just been appointed archbishop of San Salvador, into active opposition to the government and solidarity with the peasantry. Romero himself would be murdered three years later. In all, seventeen priests would die at the hands of the El Salvadoran junta. But their efforts to preach the subversive good news of spiritual and material liberation helped build a society in which wealth was a little more evenly distributed and a Church better able to see Christ in the faces of the people. So the bullets that cut him down didn’t silence Grande after all.
12 March
Preah Maha Ghosananda
23 May 1929—12 March 2007